The Troubled Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” ultimately seems to at once embody and expose the limits of utopian thinking.
Northrop Frye
Four Intriguing Ideas from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism
Autonomous Verbal Structures Frye can’t start critiquing literature without first defining what literature is. (Actually, in the introduction he starts at the very beginning by defining criticism itself. Pedantic? A little. Worth reading? Definitely.) He eventually settles on what I find to be one of the more intriguing definitions of literature: “autonomous verbal structures.” Outside…
Harold Bloom’s Song of Self
Here’s the story of my first and only encounter with Harold Bloom. It was the first week of a new semester, my last semester of graduate school, and I was waiting in a stuffy seminar room packed with sharply dressed undergraduates. The luckiest students had secured seats around the grand conference table while the rest of…